Fourth Blog: Flickr

Our group had a couple main ideas before we decided on our final project. At first we wanted to show a story of a guy how gets sucked into a virtual world and he has to defeat a dragon or something of the sort. The only problem with that idea was that we learned that another group was using the dragon idea. So after some thought we decided we wanted to pretend that we were in a Grand Theft Auto game. Not only would we pretend to be in GTA we decided to have me play a female gamer who is playing as a man in GTA. We decided that we would have our main character (Ryan) would play mimic the things the normal GTA character would do. For example, hijack a car or rob a bank. From here we decided that Dyllan would be the car driver (who ends up killed by Ryan) and Marc would be a fleeing passenger of the car. Then have the final picture as my character leaving the game controller.

After our group decided what story we were going to tell, everything came together very nicely. I happened to have a nice camera, so we used that for our shooting. Our group got together during our regular class meeting time on Tuesday. We decided to do our GTA portion of the photo shoot in the daylight under the bridge by the Banta Bowl. We chose this location because it looked slightly sketchy. There was even some graffiti in that location but we ended up not using the pictures because they weren’t as good as we had hoped.

We then chose to take our “bank robbing” pictures outside of Chase. After those pictures were taken, we took the pictures with my character in Marc’s dorm later on that night. We decided it would be better in the dark to give it a different atmosphere rather than one similar to our “game”. After we chose which pictures to use for our final project I edited the GTA pictures to make them look similar to Grand Theft Auto 3 screen set up.

I had a friend help me create a crowbar icon for our photo because in GTA3, such an icon does not exist. We even made it so that the stars that appear in the game appeared in our pictures. Along with the stars, money also appears on a couple of occasions. Once when Ryan mugs Dyllan and the other when Ryan robs the bank. The time also changes as the story goes on.

            Our final project can be found HERE.

            I had a lot of fun working on this project with my group. I found that Flickr is easy enough to use after I got used to how the site worked. Our preparation for this project was simple. We set a time to meet and take pictures (during a meeting we held) and I brought my camera. When I had all of the pictures edited I found that Flickr was not that hard to use. It was pretty simple after I surfed the site for a little bit. Flickr makes it easy for users to share their photos with other people on the Internet. We tagged our photos as casual gaming and grand theft auto. The reason we chose these was because it basically described what was going on in the photos. In pictures where my character was playing video games, the tag read casual gaming. When the photos showed the GTA ones, the tags read grand theft auto. Tagging can be helpful because if you are looking for a certain topic or subject matter. You just type in what you are looking for and people who have tagged their pictures as such will appear in the search bar.